[mubhij]

These are all great but not realistic given the current competition and the academic mindset I have seen here. Many of my fellow graduate students consider robotics to be the future of how science will be done as most, if not all, of the work done in the lab can be done by robots. We need cheap and open-source liquid handling robots with a well documented platform. The labs of the future will not require man labor except but to think and that means scientists will be ask to publish a standardized protocol file with any plugins they used and all other labs will have to do is run that file and provide the materials. That will make replication incredibly easy and cheap.

[gipp]

This is applicable only to a limited subset of a handful of fields. There's more kinds of research than -omics and organic synthesis/combichem.

[mubhij]

I agree it would be a lot easier and plausible for the biomedical sciences and for material/organic/inorganic synthesis. Certainly the theory work will be done by scientists and the design of experiments. Hmmm I wonder for people developing equipment if we could write a whole bunch of plugins that allow a robot to construct different modules of equipment from raw materials and a built-in 3D printer. Again theory and design by the scientist but won't have to spend hours building and testing each component. There are very few scientists I have met or heard speak, and I am at a top 10 grad school, that are doing any method/technology development that are a huge leap from pre-existing science and technology.

[untilHellbanned]

Nobody is going to allow their work to be commoditized in the way you describe. The issues are 100% about human psychology. There just aren't any equitable and widely-adoptable standards so far for evaluating work and the scientists that do it.

Remember anyone can create a Facebook clone but it will never be Facebook. There is a very abstract currency in the human mind that no robot will ever solve.

[geographomics]

I'll believe that when a robot can, for example, euthanise and dissect a rat to extract a specific part of a specific tissue, without mistakes or contamination. There's a lot of lab work that would need some pretty advanced AI to replace human control.

[mubhij]

Give the rat a label that binds specifically to those tissues and guide the robot to the tissue using that. Self-guided robots to be used in surgery are being developed and if I remember currently there is one available for a very minor form of neurosurgery that involves sticking a very thin needle into the skull. What you need a robot for is very much possible and FYI they will be able to do it with better precision and less contamination.

[geographomics]

That's a really good point, I hadn't considered the translational benefits from surgical automation.

I still think we're a long way off from automated dissection though. An AI performing these tasks would need very high level of situational awareness to be able to interpret the internal structure of a moving animal.